What is Time to Fill and How to Reduce It?
Accelerating your hiring speed is tough.
Considering the transformations in the recruitment market where the hiring process is highly candidate-driven, it’s no surprise that speed can be your competitive advantage.
Most recruiters consider time to fill as their north star to measure their hiring speed. It offers a realistic view of how long is your hiring process so you can take proactive measures to resolve inefficiencies in your recruitment process, reduce the cost of unfilled positions, and get more repeat business from clients.
According to Robert Half, 57% of job seekers lose interest in a job if the hiring process is lengthy.
Studies on candidate engagement show that it’s important to communicate and build relationships right from the get-go. Because let’s face it, this isn’t the generation to go radio silent on. In-demand candidates are often the first ones to drop out in frustration if the hiring process is too slow and ghosting candidates that didn’t make the cut is a big no-no!
Using a CRM for recruitment is a great way to reduce your time fill. A good recruiting CRM will provide full transparency into the success of your hiring process. So you can easily track and analyze which stages of your hiring process take more time, identify opportunities to shorten your hiring process, and nurture candidate relationships in an automated manner.
In this guide, we’ll share everything you need to know about using a recruitment CRM to reduce your time to fill – using automated email sequences, building a talent pool, nurturing candidate relationships, and more.
What is Time To Fill?
Time to fill in the total number of days you need to fill a position. It is typically measured by the number of calendar days between approving a job requisition and the job acceptance. This is a critical metric that helps you plan your hiring better and also lets you know if you’re taking too long to fill a role.
How to calculate time to fill?
To calculate your average time to fill just calculate the total number of days it has taken you to fill all open positions in a given period (such as a year), then divide this number by the total number of roles.
Formula to calculate time to fill
This is the formula:
Time to fill = TTF 1 + TTF 2 + TTF 3 / Total number of positions filled in that time period
Why is it Important to Track Time-To-Fill?
The benefits of measuring time to fill are in its application to improve business planning, speed up your recruitment process, and enhance the candidate experience. Having lower time to fill can help you get repeat business from a client and also impact your conversion rate on candidates, as you’re able to drive their recruitment process faster.
Your hiring speed will impact all your projects in the future – your team’s productivity, growth, sales, and profitability. It’s important to empower your recruitment team with the right tools so they can pull the trigger when a great candidate comes on the market.
That’s where a recruitment CRM comes in. Modern recruitment software like Recruiterflow lets you create well-structured custom hiring pipelines with just a few clicks. The kicker? It comes loaded with intuitive recruitment automation features that take care of manual and repetitive tasks for you.
Sourcing candidates, notifying team members, communicating with candidates and clients, and managing various hiring projects in a single dashboard are easier and faster. So recruiters can focus on other important tasks, while the CRM takes care of the time-intensive tasks.
Let’s take a look at the 9 ways to reduce your time to fill, optimize your existing hiring pipeline, and hire top talent seamlessly.
How Can You Reduce Time To Fill Using a Recruitment CRM?
In order to find the perfect candidate, it is always a race against time! Here are 8 tips for reducing this frustrating waiting period with Recruitment CRM
1. Run Great Intake Meetings
Einstein famously said – If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes about the solution.
An intake meeting is not a requirement gathering but rather a way for you to understand the problem that the hiring manager is trying to solve! This is one of the most underrated, yet crucial parts of the recruitment process. Something that experienced battle-hardened recruiters know far too well! It’s what impacts your hiring efficiency and recruitment metrics like time to fill.
Running great intake meetings translates to stronger recruiter/hiring manager relations, more streamlined communication, and clarity of what would make a successful hire resulting in decreased time to hire. They set the cadence right for the hiring process and help reduce the time to fill the position.
Make sure that both the hiring manager and recruiter have visibility into the hiring process. A recruitment CRM like Recruiterflow offer radical transparency, end-to-end management, and automated reports to measure the efficiency of your hiring processes.
2. Accelerate Sourcing by Automating Job Postings
I know it’s not the coolest thing out there! As a recruiter, you probably pride yourself in finding that purple squirrel that is not an active candidate and there was no way in hell that your client could’ve found them without you! Yes, that’s fantastic but the fact of the matter is that a large number of people still find jobs on job boards. It might or might not work for your specific industry or niche but that doesn’t mean that job boards are dead!
When it comes to recruiting reports or KPIs like time to fill, the most important thing is to figure out how to get more leverage for your time. One of the most effective ways to do this is via automation.
Within recruiting teams, there are multiple collaborators, tools, and functions split off. This means you waste a lot of time doing manual work and trying to connect the dots. By automating job postings, you give yourself more time to actually focus on high-quality candidates.
Automating your adverts on various tools will also help you to target more candidates all over the internet and help you reduce costs on ads with low ROI. With automated job postings, recruiters can reduce cost-per-applicant by over 30%.
ProTip: Recruiterflow integrates with more than 50 job boards across the world, including job posting integrations with leading ones like Indeed and LinkedIn
3. Automate Resume Parsing and Screening
The best recruiting software for agencies can dramatically cut down your time to fill without losing quality. It lets you automate various manual tasks including resume parsing and candidate screening.
You’d be surprised to know that 71% of recruiters use an applicant tracking system that doesn’t allow them to rank resumes. At Recruiterflow, we offer integrations with resume ranking software that leverage AI and use contextual learning to understand the interrelation of skills, experience, job functions, and domains to automate your recruiting process.
By choosing the best recruitment software, you can parse and screen candidates’ resumes with just a few clicks. Recruiterflow customers use a combination of advanced filters and keywords to identify highly qualified candidates for their hiring pipelines. This helps them decrease their time to fill the vacancy without compromising on the quality of their candidates.
4. Build a Talent Pool of Top Candidates
Creating a talent pool – a group of active and passive candidates – is one of the best ways to reduce your time to fill a position.
So, for instance, you have an open position for the role of a senior developer. Instead of advertising your job, waiting for candidates to apply, and before you start sourcing on LinkedIn or other platforms, you can simply use your talent pool to match the right candidate with the job.
Your talent pool already has a relationship with you and is much easier to connect with and they are much more likely to respond to your outreach as well.
You can significantly cut down the time and resources you’d otherwise have to spend on finding a new candidate from scratch. Moreover, as virtual recruitment increases, you can conduct talent mapping to assess a company’s existing workforce, create an ideal candidate persona, learn competitors’ hiring patterns, and make sure your clients have a competitive edge.
To get you started, here are some talent mapping templates you can use right away.
5. Automate Your Communication With Candidates
Recruitment teams need to keep track of all hiring activities, whether it’s sourcing new candidates, moving them from one stage to another, or updating clients on the hiring progress. This often leads to communications going on the back burner.
To reduce your time to fill, you should automate your communication with candidates. Modern executive search software like Recruiterflow enables recruiters to sync their emails and set up automated email workflows. This means recruiters can automate follow-ups and track when and how many times candidates open the email.
To quickly get started, use these ready-to-use recruiting email templates that you can personalize and send in bulk.
6. Automate Interview Scheduling
Plenty of recruitment CRM offers pre-packaged automation features for interview scheduling.
Recruiterflow offers two-way calendar sync. This means it automatically syncs calendar events that you schedule in Recruiterflow to your personal and your team’s shared calendar. Similarly, all events that you schedule in your Google calendar are synced with Recruiterflow.
So, it eliminates the need to use different tools and provides complete visibility into a single recruiting dashboard.
On another note, if you often hire candidates in large volumes, you may even want to consider using automated scheduling software that automatically syncs up your availability with the right candidates and allows them to self-schedule.
By giving more flexibility to candidates – while seamlessly managing your schedule – you can even bring down the number of candidates who drop out of the interview process.
7. Track and Measure Your Talent Pipeline
A talent pipeline is a list of pre-screened candidates who are fit for certain roles. It’s a great way to reduce your time to fill the vacancy because you don’t need to scramble to fill positions, sort hundreds of resumes to find the right candidate, or conduct infinite interviews.
Beyond just building a talent pipeline, it’s equally important to track and measure it holistically. It lets you dig deeper and more granularly into the data.
As recruiting has grown more technical and quantitative, executive search firms leverage analytics to optimize their hiring processes, drive qualified candidates, and scale
Measuring your talent pipeline metrics helps you optimize your candidate sourcing strategies in finding and engaging highly qualified candidates.
8. Hire Faster With A Structured Hiring Process
As your recruiting agency grows, so will your challenges and complexity. Without well-structured processes in place, it becomes increasingly difficult to grow your business.
You need to have a well-designed process, a series of events that unfold to deliver a great experience.
For example, a hiring process might be:
- Recruiter sources a candidate
- The recruiter does a screening and resume check
- If qualified, the candidate will be asked for a skills-assessment
- Once passed, the candidate is scheduled for a video interview
- If selected, the candidate will be marked as “hired”
But to reduce time to fill, you need to dig a little deeper. Identify the time it takes for the candidates to move between each stage. For example, from the application stage to the resume screening stage, to the pre-assessment, to video interviews, and so on.
Find out specific roles that take longer to fill. What are the bottlenecks in such cases? How does your time to fill compare with the standard time to hire? What are some manual, repetitive – but important – tasks recruiters invest their time into? What’s the quality of hire and the ratio of good to poor applicants you get?
By using a recruitment CRM you can build a functional system that’ll keep your hiring process streamlined and save time; thus reducing the time to fill.
You can integrate all your sourcing, communication, and sales channels into a single recruiting dashboard. Your recruitment team will function at a much faster pace and will nurture new candidates with ease.
With Recruiterflow software for recruiting agencies, for example, you can automate most of your recruitment processes. Here’s a quick example. Let’s say that it takes on average 4 days for your recruiters to qualify candidates and move them into the next stage. To bring this number down, you might want to automate some of the manual tasks.
Bonus – Run Email Sequences To Get To Passive Candidates Quickly
Experts agree that an employee receives an average of 121 emails per day. That’s a lot of competition when it comes to getting your emails read. And most importantly, engage a passive candidate in an opportunity.
Before you develop a recruitment email funnel, you need to know what it is and why it’s effective. A recruitment email funnel is a series of emails about how a candidate goes from the sourcing stage to the hired stage.
For candidates, it’s all about responsiveness and communication throughout the hiring process. They don’t want to be in the dark about where they stand on their application. An email funnel will help you better communicate with them using auto-responses and personalized messaging, and provide real-time email updates on their application status.
According to a survey by CareerBuilder, 61% of candidates defined candidate experience as “employers who respond quickly throughout the process.” Even if they’re not the correct fit, candidates want to be notified.
Moreover, candidates look for a personalized experience where they don’t have to constantly interact with bots, age-ol support systems, and jump hoops to know about their application. The best way to offer them a great experience is by creating email funnels.
Recruiterflow’s recruitment CRM offers automated email sequences. Customers vouch for this feature and how it’s a big differentiator for their recruiting firms. The best part is that once you set up an email sequence, it pretty much runs on its own.
Imagine this. You’re hiring software developers for a software company. As soon as you source a candidate, you want to set up initial communication to nurture them. You can create an email sequence tailored for the specific job role – share details about the company, role, description, salary range, location, skills needed, and so on.
Here’s what an email sequence would look like:
Graphic for email sequences
There are countless ways to create automated email funnels and we love to see how our customers bring so much creativity into it. Some of the staffing agencies even automate internal email communications – a big-time saver! Others use it for both candidates as well as clients – cuts down the endless back and forth.
Wrapping It Up: Ways To Reduce Time To Fill
By using recruitment CRM to reduce your time to fill, you can:
- Greatly reduce manual data-entry errors by removing human typing from the process
- Eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks and duplicate work from areas of human responsibility
- Improve overall productivity and efficiency by making your recruiting process much faster
- Create transparency within hiring workflows
- Nurture candidates and clients to maintain strong relationships
A recruitment CRM keeps recruiters and hiring managers on track and empowers them with ways to save cost, and time, and increase productivity. It ensures teams prioritize tasks on a day-to-day basis, ensuring candidates and clients are not forgotten, and relevant stakeholders are updated on time.
If you want to learn more about how Recruiterflow can help you reduce your time to fill and achieve your hiring goals, please feel free to sign up for a 14-day free trial.
